4
Slamming the book shut, Page went rigid. His gray eyes narrowed as he inspected the room: appliances, cabinets, the telecomp screen.
He tilted his head and listened, his mouth working slightly as his expression flattened out.
He sat a moment, two, then rose abruptly and walked out of the kitchen. Keeping close to the walls, he stepped across the living room. At the front window he squatted down and peered past the curtain. He did this at each window, making his way clockwise back to the kitchen.
He couldn’t quite say what he’d heard, or if there had been any sound at all. It had been more a feeling, as of something watching him, a presence at the very edge of perception making careful note of where he was and what he was doing. He’d felt it before, and sometimes there had been a watcher and sometimes not. It was all the same to Page. The one time he ignored his intuition would be the last, of that he was sure.
He thought of Bobby; Bobby playing with him, maybe, a little turn of the tables. But Bobby would have made too much noise, and besides, he knew better than to annoy Page.
His gaze fell on the telecomp. A possibility—it was the easiest thing in the world to rig a comp for surveillance; he’d done it a hundred times himself. But not likely. They wouldn’t be so stupid as to think he’d be fooled by that.
He stepped over to it all the same and laid his wrist on the casing. His eyes closed, and he stood quietly for a few seconds. His lips drew back from his teeth; a sound escaped, half-moan and half-growl. He threw his head back and raised his hand, cradling it as if it hurt.
Nothing in there; no sign of an intrusion or any operational program at all, just DRAMs chuckling away emptily.
He shook his head to clear it of the disorientation that tapping always entailed. The feeling was still there, a slight tug at his mind. Going to the table, he swept up the gloves, pulling them on and clenching his fists. He smiled as the alloy stiffened. He went to the door and slipped outside.
The clouds had parted, and he squinted through the snow-white glare. Backing against the side of the house, he looked about him. His eyes halted at a shed twenty feet away, and a spasm crossed his face before he went on.
It was all clear, straight out to the woodline thirty yards back. The trees were thick, but there was no brush, so he could see a long way in. If they were out there, they were good.
He made his way around the house, pausing at each corner. He found nothing: no cars on the road, no figures in the distance. The only tracks he saw were his own.
Out front he stomped his feet to knock the snow off his boots. He looked the place over. It had its bad points: set on a small hill with only a line of low bushes separating it from the road. In the open and hardly defensible, but everything else was right. It was all vacation homes up here, no town within five miles.
The house was off the main routes, and the owner had bought it only a few months back. He’d checked that.
And the area of operations was less than twenty miles away. He lifted his eyes to the low mountain rising to the east. He’d be able to see Ironwood from the peak.
He went back in, pulled off the gloves and laid them carefully on the table.
He was hungry but didn’t feel like cooking anything. Opening a cabinet, he sorted through the cans. The Bollingers had stocked the place well, he had to say that. He picked up a can of salmon and pressed the top until it peeled open, then grabbed a fork and wandered through the house, eating out of the can.
The sense of being watched was gone, but he thought about it as he ate. It meant something; everything did, no matter how trivial. All things interconnected, each bound up with everything else, moving, changing, melding together over nothingness, the abyss that lay under all. He knew that, had always known it.
The problem was to see how it fit, what place it occupied in the pattern developing around the events he’d set in motion. He was being told something; he had to work out what.
Walking into the living room, he sat down at the coffee table. He’d cleared that end, pushing the magazines and books to one side. All that remained were a pen, a legal pad, and a neat stack of written-on sheets.
He wrote quickly, holding the can in his other hand. A short list, everything that he knew was coming down today. Bobby pulling in, probably Telford as well, the fact that the local vigs had been out in force this morning. He paused, then wrote “strike force ops” and put a question mark after it.
He thought of making a note of the guy who had waved to him yesterday when he shoveled the driveway, but you had to draw the line somewhere. Occasionally he tried to work in everything, the news, what the weather was like, the dreams he’d had the night before, but after a certain point it no longer made sense. He didn’t have the ability yet to integrate it all.
For a moment he wondered if he should put a question mark after Telford’s name also, but decided against it. Telford had said he was coming today, and he always kept the promises he made to his flock. Maybe he should put another tap on the lodge comp, but . . . No, too risky, bad enough he’d done it last night. If Telford had checked, he might have pinned it.
He took a mouthful of salmon. A chunk fell off the fork and dribbled down his chin. He pushed it into his mouth without looking down. Finger still on his lips, he froze, then started chuckling. He put the can down, took the pen, and crossed out the question mark following strike force.
That was it, staring right at him, exactly what his subconscious had been trying to say. They’d be showing up today too. Synchronicity, all of them arriving at once.
Only it wasn’t coincidence. He’d made it happen that way.
Raising the pen to his mouth, he began gnawing on the tip. He couldn’t be sure about the Cossacks, but . . . No, it fit the pattern perfectly. Why would it be lining up like this otherwise? He’d sure as hell left enough of a trail for them. What else did he have to do, send them a fax?
He wondered who they’d assign to this one. Most of the original operatives had either quit or been phased out after that old fuck Amory bit the dust, and he’d heard that one of their hotshots had been messed up in New York a while back. It made no difference. They could send them all, just as long as Cummins showed up.
He’d think about it some more later. Dating the sheet, he tore it off and added it to the stack on the table.
Someday he wouldn’t have doubts like this. Once he crossed the threshold, burst the paradigm, and entered into true consciousness. It was coming; he could feel it, late at night, close enough to touch . . .
He got up and went to the kitchen, boots light on the hardwood. The clock on the screen read twelve-thirty. If Bobby left on time, he’d be here in an hour, but he was always late. Page frowned. He wouldn’t have much use for Bobby Golden once this was finished. Stealing cars and picking up women, that was all Bobby was good for.
He sat down and grabbed the book he’d been reading. The dust jacket was intact and nearly as clean as when he’d bought it years ago—he hated anyone who mistreated a book. He studied the picture on the cover, a dimly lit profile of a cold-eyed man wearing a mustache. A thick volume, nearly a thousand pages. The title was Stalin’s Diaries.
Opening it at random, he smiled as his eyes fell on a well-read passage.
. . . stared at me with those pig eyes. His face was ashen. I tapped Yagoda’s report once again. “That’s right, Nikola. It’s all in here.”
He said nothing, and I went on. “And not thousands, either. Not tens of thousands, no. millions. The kulaks will be an extinct breed when we have finished.”
He began whining to me that they were not kulaks at all but simple peasants, the salt of the earth and so forth. His voice grew louder as he approached my desk and braced his arms upon it. He ended by pounding his fist, crying, “You must do something!”
I confess that I was somewhat startled. I would never have thought he had it in him. Nonetheless, I stared at him wordlessly until he came to himself and backed away.
I allowed my reply to wait until I had lit a cigarette. He spent the time staring at the carpet, his fat face twitching. His head rose as I cleared my throat. “Nikita Sergeevich,” I said. “You have been my strong right hand. You have been a credit to the Soviet and to the Party . . .” I went on in that vein while he sweated, awaiting my final words. I paused before speaking them, enjoying the sight of him cringing like a Jew before a Cossack. “Nevertheless,” I told him. “If you ever speak to me in those tones again, I will bury you.”
He said only, “Yes, comrade,” when I asked if he understood. I made him repeat the words before dismissing him. He backed out, nearly colliding with the door in his rush . . .
Lifting his head, Page smiled blankly, his face frozen. He lowered his eyes and leafed on, until he reached a page with only the words the purges 1936-39 and an epigram beneath them. His lips moved as he read: “To make one’s plans, to select one’s victims, to wreak an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed. There is nothing like it in the world.”
He closed the book slowly, hand on the cover, and considered the others stacked on the table. Mein Kampf, the Table Talk, Goebbels’s and Speer’s diaries, the biography of Pol Pot. He had read them all, many times, but Stalin was the best. Not just plans being made, not the words of a pretender, not the interpretation of some idiot academic, but the pure product: the thoughts of a man of immense power while that power was being wielded to the fullest extent.
The diaries had been discovered in the Kremlin back in the nineties and published a short time later. Page had the first North American edition. There was some debate as to whether or not they were forgeries, but he didn’t listen to that. They were the real thing; he’d sensed it the first time he read them. There was an aura of truth about them that could not possibly have been faked.
He’d read it through six times and some parts beyond counting. He knew where they were; there was no need to mark them. He knew them by heart.
Lately he had been concentrating on the final section, the pages covering 1948 to 1952. Those entries were strange; a nearly incoherent mix of real incidents, elliptical phrases, and snatches of what might be nightmare, dream, or vision. The book’s introduction—by some Kremlinologist at Yale—said that the last section was marked by Stalin’s growing paranoia and alcoholism, but Page disagreed. Those pages were where the truth lay. They were the testament, the final legacy, the signpost for those who would follow. Page hadn’t worked it out yet, but he was convinced it was there, a truth too terrible to be put into clear language.
He reached again for the book but stopped and drew his hand back. He didn’t feel like reading now. He was too keyed up, filled with anticipation for what was coming. Another two days, or three, and he’d face that truth himself.
He got up and paced the room. He wanted to go there now, to drive to Ironwood, track down Cummins, see his expression when he realized who it was that confronted him. To finish it, today.
It would happen soon enough. Let it unfold in its own way. Control, that was the key. Control and patience. That was how he’d made it this far, why he was still here when all the rest were dead meat. Be like Iosif Vissarionovich. Slow; slow and sure. To make one’s plans . . .
He picked up the gloves and went out. The sun had vanished, and it had grown chilly. Pulling them on, he walked to the shed and reached into his pocket for the key, an old-fashioned metal type. He unlocked the door and swung it wide.
There they were, Gary and Tess Bollinger, frozen where he’d thrown them. Gary had tried to defend his wife and as a result had been messed up a bit, but Tess was nearly perfect except for the odd angle of her head. She lay atop her husband, eyes wide, mouth open. A trace of her final expression remained.
Her hair, long and auburn, was draped over a fertilizer sack. It appeared stiff, and Page idly wondered whether hair could freeze.
He inclined his head to meet her eyes. “Hi, honey.”
A car whined on the road. Drawing himself up, Page listened. The sound dropped in tone as it came nearer, and he heard the crackle of tires on ice. A squeak of hinges, footsteps, then a voice calling, “Page?”
He was closing the door when he realized that he’d twisted the latch nearly double. Grimacing, he forced it straight and slipped the lock on. He was about to snap it shut when he thought better of it. Leave it—Bobby might want to take a look.
Out front, Bobby hollered once more. Page said nothing as he made his way around the house.